Obituaries

* Virginia Admiral; Artist, Mother of Robert DeNiro

Virginia Admiral, 85, a painter and writer and the mother of actor Robert DeNiro. The Oregon-born Admiral studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. While working on the Federal Arts Project in Oakland in the late 1930s, she and the poet Robert Duncan produced a single issue of the magazine Epitaph, which later became The Experimental Review. Relocating to New York, Admiral enrolled at the Hofmann School to study painting with Hans Hofmann. While at the school, she met the artist Robert DeNiro. They married in 1942 and their son Robert was born a year later. The couple later divorced, and Admiral supported herself and her son by running a typing service. She also wrote for True Crime magazine. She was active in the antiwar movement during the 1960s and later helped establish low-cost housing for artists in the Soho district of Manhattan. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Her ex-husband died in 1993. On July 27 in New York City.